


Bloodstone

by Thorne



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-14
Updated: 2010-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-07 05:59:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/62107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thorne/pseuds/Thorne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shiva dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bloodstone

It does not please her to be here.

This place is far from where she used to be, and the air is too warm against her skin. The water here--- too much of it for her at once, water is a part of her art but this is not to her taste. Water has such _sameness_ to it. It should be given contrast, given unique patterns like the crystals from her fingertips, it should broken by ice and so turned to beauty. She longs for her mountains and the purity of white snow, the light footsteps of priestesses and the ringing of the gold disks on their anklets as they walked quickly over cold stone floors.

For all she knows, her mountains are ground to sand, and the chanting words of her rituals are dusty relics among languages. For all she knows, her world is dead.

She came over the sea years ago in a sailor's pocket, clinking gently against a seashell and two golden coins. This galls her still. She came to the man-boy as the prize of a mere card game, as some vulgar _trinket_. As if he knew what he held, as if a goddess could be _won_, like some cheap amulet. She is more precious than silver or gold, rubies and diamonds are as common as sand next to her.

_Luck against drowning_, the man who lost her said as he pressed her into the boy's hand, _luck for life_.

Luck. She knew and still knows that fate is much more than that, and death is never the end. She had not intended to grant him any such gift.

Voices spoke to her when she first walked through her stone-crystal halls, bewildered as a fly finding itself caught in sap, sealed in amber. Some voices still speak to her on occasion, they tell her that mako bleeds from the veins of the Planet. Blood and stone are joined in her memory, the wet smears pooling on her altars from sacrifices. She herself does not recall ever bleeding but nor does she recall becoming stone. She knows this is not her world that she looks out upon through her red window, she is aware that somehow she travels between two worlds and somehow the stone is responsible for it.

The first boy, her sailor boy--- he called her only once.

She had not intended to grant him any such gift as life or luck. But she was lonely and centuries had passed since the Defilement when her world was destroyed. The entire sky was on fire, and her priestesses bled their lives out on the floor in mute supplication, dead from rubble, dead from panicking invaders, some choosing to end their own lives with the ritual silver knives in sacrifice for the world's salvation.

All for nothing. She remembers red swallowing the world and swallowing her, and then she awoke in this strange neither here-nor-there place. There is nothing here but a long passageway she continually walks down, because there is nowhere else to go. At one end of the passageway is a blank wall, at the other end of the passageway is a window that she may look out of.

She was lonely. His worship came to please her, and she grew accustomed to his murmured litany for protection. She began to watch him from her window, and she began to wonder at this new world she could not seem to enter. Perhaps he felt her watching, because he grew into the habit of caressing his lucky piece when his hands were idle, or before any dangerous task. She watched him in long windless calms, in storms, and climbing in the rigging of his ship, and she could almost feel his hands.

She watched. Time passed and the ocean passed as well. The day he called her, the winds were strong and the waves were high as his ship rose and fell on the crests of waves, trying to come into harbor. It was the worst storm of all so far, and the boy's panic tasted like blood and stone. He dropped from his high perch on the rigging like a falling, flailing star, and as he fell, he called and his hand clenched around her and---

The window became a door and she was free, free, tumbling outwards into the world she'd watched for so long and never touched. She tasted salt briefly as she leaped outwards and he fell inwards, and then the world was nothing but the terrified faces of sailors below, a mingling of white and blue, and the terrible beauty of ice and snow under the benediction of her hand----

No one really speaks of the day the ocean froze over, least of all the young man who landed on ice instead of sinking beneath waves.

Time passes for her, perhaps more slowly than it does for the world she used to watch, perhaps more quickly. It has been long enough for her to grow into legend again, but she is tired of legend when she is so far from where she used to be. It has almost been long enough for her to forget what the outside world was like, but she clings to her memories as she walks and looks. Her boy has grown old and gone over the sea and she cannot follow him.

These days, she walks down her passageway that seems duller each time and looks out her window, but there is nothing to see. The window is getting clouded over, the sights and sounds are getting dimmer as each day goes by. One day, she's afraid that her window will be gone and there will be nothing but blankness there as well. Sometimes she breathes ice on the blank wall and draws pictures of her old world, watches them melt away, and feels her own cold tears tumble down her cheeks like diamonds, until they too are nothing.

She is lonely again.

The voices have begun to speak again, but they no longer speak to her. They say the end is coming for this world as well, and someone is coming who will play a part in this. They say he will be legend and yet not, walking in another's footsteps and other worlds. They say the time has come.

She is waiting for her next boy. She dreams of blue eyes and going home.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Changeling, to try and figure out how the hell Shiva ended up in Junon anyway. I have this vague theory on summon materia, that they're all from alternate or parallel worlds that were destroyed-- beings that got caught up in the lifestream, which is the only thing that's the same on all worlds, and which links them all. So, they get preserved in materia, which serves as the sort of passage way from one world to another. But it's only a theory.


End file.
